The Impossibles | Page 2

red Cadillac?
The sidewalk became a little harder, and, Malone suddenly realized that
he was lying on it. Something terrible had happened; he knew that right
away. He opened his eyes to look for the girl, but the sunset had
become much brighter; his head began to pound with the slow
regularity of a dead-march, and he closed his eyes again in a hurry.
The sidewalk swayed a little, but he managed to keep his balance on it
somehow; and after a couple of minutes it was quiet again. His head
hurt. Maybe that was the terrible thing that had happened, but Malone
wasn't quite sure. As a matter of fact, he wasn't very sure about
anything, and he started to ask himself questions to make certain he
was all there.
He didn't feel all there. He felt as if several of his parts had been
replaced with second- or even third-hand experimental models, and
something had happened to the experiment. It was even hard to think of
any questions, but after a while he managed to come up with a few.
What is your name?
Kenneth Malone.
Where do you live?
Washington, D. C.
What is your work?
I work for the FBI.
Then what the hell are you doing on a sidewalk in New York in broad
daylight?

He tried to find an answer to that, but there didn't seem to be any, no
matter where he looked. The only thing he could think of was the red
Cadillac.
And if the red Cadillac had anything to do with anything, Malone didn't
know about it.
Very slowly and carefully, he opened his eyes again, one at a time. He
discovered that the light was not coming from the gorgeous Hollywood
sunset he had dreamed up. As a matter of fact, sunset was several hours
in the past, and it never looked very pretty in New York anyhow. It was
the middle of the night, and Malone was lying under a convenient street
lamp.
He closed his eyes again and waited patiently for his head to go away.
A few minutes passed. It was obvious that his head had settled down
for a long stay, and no matter how bad it felt, Malone told himself, it
was his head, after all. He felt a certain responsibility for it. And he
couldn't just leave it lying around somewhere with its eyes closed.
He opened the head's eyes once more, and this time he kept them open.
For a long time he stared at the post of the street lamp, considering it,
and he finally decided that it looked sturdy enough to support a
hundred and sixty-five pounds of FBI man, even with the head added in.
He grabbed for the post with both hands and started to pull himself
upright, noticing vaguely that his legs had somehow managed to get
underneath him.
As soon as he was standing, he wished he'd stayed on the nice
horizontal sidewalk. His head was spinning dizzily, and his mind was
being sucked down into the whirlpool. He held on to the post grimly
and tried to stay conscious.
A long time, possibly two or three seconds, passed. Malone hadn't
moved at all when the two cops came along.
One of them was a big man with a brassy voice and a face that looked

as if it had been overbaked in a waffle iron. He came up behind Malone
and tapped him on the shoulder, but Malone barely felt the touch. Then
the cop bellowed into Malone's ear: "What's the matter, buddy?"
Malone appreciated the man's sympathy. It was good to know that you
had friends. But he wished, remotely, that the cop and his friend, a
shorter and thinner version of the beat patrolman, would go away and
leave him in peace. Maybe he could lie down on the sidewalk again and
get a couple of hundred years' rest.
Who could tell? "Mallri," he said.
"You're all right?" the big cop said. "That's fine. That's great. So why
don't you go home and sleep it off?"
"Sleep?" Malone said. "Home?"
"Wherever you live, buddy," the big cop said. "Come on. Can't stand
around on the sidewalk all night."
Malone shook his head, and decided at once never to do it again. He
had some kind of rare disease, he realized. His brain was loose, and the
inside of his skull was covered with sandpaper. Every time his head
moved, the brain jounced against some of the sandpaper.
But the policemen thought he was drunk. That wasn't right. He couldn't
let the police get the wrong impression of FBI agents. Now the men
would go around telling people that the FBI was always drunk and
disorderly.
"Not drunk," he said clearly.
"Sure," the big cop said.